Thursday Feb 19, 2015

I ran into Erik Benner, founder of the SPARC/Solaris SIG group for IOUG, at Rocky Mountain Oracle User Group Training Days yesterday. He has been busy. Not only is he working on some labs and demos for OTN's upcoming Virtual Technology Summits, but he's taken the time to write a three-part blog to show you how easy it is to install and play with Oracle Solaris 11.2 for x86 on VirtualBox. In his own words ... "Recently I had a DBA at an IOUG event complain that they were unable to install from the Solaris 11.2 ISO. They had seen me demo Openstack a few weeks ago, and wanted to know how to install Solaris 11.2 in a VM. So guys… here is a step by step for you."

Covers how to launch the Solaris VM, how to assign it memory, how to create a virtual drive and configure it as a dynamic allocated drive to save space, how to install the Oracle Solaris 11.2 image, and how to start it.

You've probably heard by now that the new patching system in Oracle Solaris 11 lets you patch or revert back with a simple reboot. Erik walks us through a few simple uses of the beadm and pkg update commands.

How to configure the networking capabilities of your VirtualBox environment to run Oracle Database 12c so that you can experiment with its new V$KERNEL_IO_OUTLIER views and the Optimized Shared Memory method of managing database memory. Covers adding disks and configuring them into a ZFS pool, adding a NIC to the database server, and setting up IP addresses correctly. This is done differently in Oracle Solaris 11 than in previous releases, as Erik explains.

About Erik Benner

Erik Benner is an enterprise architect for Mythics Corporation, which provides training, systems integration, consulting, and managed services for the entire Oracle product line of cloud, software, support, hardware, engineered systems, and appliances.

About the Photograph

That's a 2015 Ducati Monster 821 in the foreground, and my 01 Ducati 748S Superbike in the background. I took that picture in my driveway in late Fall of 2014.

Friday Jan 31, 2014

Most of my workdays start by shapechanging me into a seven-headed Hydra, and each Hydra promptly makes a beeline for multi-tasking hell. So, when I get a chance to simplify something, anything, I jump on it.

Ginny has done that for OTN at last twice. Below are two of her exercises in simplifying our lives. We published these articles before, but we recently had to rebuild one of them because somebody (I'm not going to say who) deleted it. To avoid annoying one of your Hydras, and instead send you off to a peaceful weekend, here they are again.

Before installing Oracle Database 10g or 11g on a system, you need to preconfigure the operating environment since the database requires certain software packages, package versions, and tweaks to kernel parameters. Ginny discovered that Oracle Linux provides a remarkably easy way to address these installation prerequisites. Find out how.

Similar to the article above, but updated for Database 12c and Oracle Linux 6. Ginny simplifies the installation of Oracle Database 11g by automatically pre-configuring Oracle Linux with the required software packages and correct kernel parameters.

Monday Jan 13, 2014

In my first 12 years of school I had a natural ability in Math and Science, but had to work hard at English and History.

When I went to college, I didn't do well in Math and Science, so I transferred into Liberal Arts, where strangely enough, I did well. After all these years I just realized why. I never had to study for Math and Science. I just understood the material. If I did any homework, I did it during class. Which means I never listened to lectures. As a result, I never learned how to learn what I didn't know. So, when college presented me with more advanced topics that I couldn't just grok, I didn't know what to do. I fell behind. I assumed I wasn't any good. The opposite was true with Liberal Arts. Literature, History, Economics, it all confused me. So I listened in class. And I studied after class. SoI did well.

This lab demonstrates how easy it is to deploy software environments with Oracle VM Templates. It uses a single-instance, Oracle Restart (Single-Instance High Availability [SIHA]), and Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) for Oracle Database as an example. During this lab, you are going to deploy a four-node Flex Cluster (three hubs and one leaf) with a dedicated network for Oracle Flex ASM traffic.

Let's forget for a minute that I work for Oracle, the leading database company in the World: that is a relatively new phenomenon. The truth is I've always known that databases dominate the solutions that computer hardware enables. Indeed, I vividly remember the early 1980s, when the emerging personal computer market was propelled largely by two primitive database applications: for balancing checkbooks and saving recipes. When Apple announced their new soft-sectored floppy drive, we had to get onto a waiting list to buy 360 KB of random access disk for our puny databases. The CEO of General Dynamics, where I worked at the time, discovered this power and the company was transformed almost overnight from analog to digital.

There are many important things DBAs do to secure their hefty compensation (had I anticipated that trend, I would have started off as a DBA, rather than as an actuary. Wait! I'm afraid there wasn't even the acronym "DBA" way back then...) One of these activities is that of cloning databases, which is done for a variety of reasons, including development, testing, and training without disrupting the actual database itself. As Sridhar points out, the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance provides an ideal platform for performing database cloning. It comes with a user-friendly interface for ease of management, a full set of data services for business continuity and disaster recovery purposes, multi-protocol support to cater to any infrastructure, analytics for monitoring and resolution purposes, and a hybrid storage pool for faster response time for test, development, and QA activities. With unlimited snapshots and cloning possibilities, many concurrent database instances can be launched for various purposes without impacting the production database.

This paper gives you a good look at the power of the graphical front end, includes examples, recommendations, best practices, and sizing considerations. As I said, this is another jewel, not to be missed.